Belonging, Behaving, and Believing: Assessing the Role of Religion on Presidential Approval

We operationalize three dimensions of religon--religous affiliation, religious commitment, and religious belief--to offer a detailed analysis of how religion affects presidential approval ratings. Using data from the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 American National Election Studies, we demonstrate that operationalizing religion as a rudimentary Protestant-Catholic affiliation dichotomy masks its influence on presidential approval. We find that religious affiliation, even when measured more precisely than with a Protestant-Catholic dichotomy, contributes less to models of presidential approval than do measures of religious commitment and (especially) orthodoxy of religious belief.